My CDT Journey: Dr Amit Deo

 It has been almost two years since I completed my CDT journey and I can safely say that I look back fondly on my years at Royal Holloway. The first time I heard about the CDT was during the final year of my maths degree in 2015 where PhD students from various universities were invited to give short talks advertising their departments. For me, the ISG presentation was a breath of fresh air and I was left convinced that pursuing a PhD in cyber security was a real possibility even without a computer science degree. After reading an introductory book on cryptography, I decided to apply and was thankfully accepted.

Like most CDT students, I spent the first year following the various courses offered and attending the industry visits. Although I came to Royal Holloway with the vague idea that I would end up researching cryptography, I was keen to understand what other PhD topics were available to someone with a mathematics background. After many discussions, machine learning emerged as a topic I wanted to investigate further and I ended up doing a summer project on malware detection. After an extremely positive summer project experience, I was torn between pursuing a PhD in machine learning and cryptography, but ultimately settled on the latter.

During the research years, I was extremely lucky to have great supervisors who were always very supportive and available for discussing ideas. This certainly helped me get up to speed in the early days of research as I hadn't spent the first year of my CDT studying my specific research topic of lattice-based cryptography. This open line of communication with my supervisors and fellow CDT students was crucial in allowing me to develop my research skills. In the end I was lucky enough to co-author papers with my PhD supervisors and fellow CDT students throughout my time in the CDT. There was also ample opportunity to attend schools and conferences which really enhanced my understanding and experience of the academic community. A particular highlight was the Bar-Ilan winter school on cryptography. Another memorable aspect of the CDT was the internship where I was able to spend three months at the SingTel research laboratory in Singapore.

In November 2019, I joined ENS de Lyon as a post-doctoral researcher in lattice-based cryptography as a natural continuation of my PhD. Having spent a year and a half there, I decided that it was time for a new experience and began looking for research opportunities in industry. I am happy to say that I have recently started a new position at Crypto Quantique -- a start up offering end-to-end security specifically for the IoT setting. I look forward to learning and solving problems in this new environment while leaning on my experiences from the CDT.

Despite following a predominantly academic route, the CDT has certainly made me appreciate the wide variety of opportunities that exist in the area of cyber security. Overall, I feel very fortunate to have met and worked with many great people throughout my CDT journey and I am sure that I will remain in contact with them for many years to come.